Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  James Richard Walsh was soon to be discharged after a four-year tour of duty aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise . Having received an undergraduate degree from Bates College prior to his enlistment, he was now enrolled as a graduate student in philosophy, thanks to the G.I. Bill, at this Jesuit college on the outskirts of Boston. To supplement his government support, he would be teaching mathematics as an assistant professor at the college. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, Jim Walsh had been raised in a strongly Catholic family. He and his younger sister Eleanor attended parochial grammar school, and after his father’s untimely demise, Jim attended Boston College High School and then Bates College, where he earned a degree in mathematics. He was teaching high school mathematics, but after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Navy. Catholicism had been the foundation of Jim Walsh’s life. His father had died when Jim was only eleven years old, and it was his mother and two maiden aunts who inspired his Catholicism. At Bates he had founded the Newman Society, an organization that promoted Catholic faith and morals among students and faculty. For him, faith was an intellectual endeavor rather than an emotional exercise. Observing the atrocities of war firsthand only strengthened his determination to explore the realm of God through the study of Catholic philosophy. Jim Walsh’s presence in the Boston College classroom did not escape the notice of the professor, the renowned Dr. Fakhri Maluf. Originally from Lebanon and with a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan, Maluf had done postdoctoral work at Harvard, and now, at age thirty-three, he held a prestigious position on the faculty of Boston College. The two men introduced themselves at the end of class. A few weeks later, Dr. Maluf invited Jim to join him on a visit to St. Benedict Center, a Catholic meeting place for Harvard and Radcliffe students, a stone’s throw from Harvard Square, where he offered free lectures in philosophy every Tuesday evening. Jim accepted the invitation and, before long, found himself engrossed in the energetic life of “the Center,” as it was called. To have walked into the Center on that day would have been to encounter a buzz. It came from the mingling of intellectual energy and youthful gaiety as scores of students congregated, many far from their families, who found it also to be a gracious home-away-from-home, a welcoming environment for socializing. The chaplain at the Center was Father Leonard Feeney, a fifty-year-old world-renowned Jesuit priest, poet, author, lecturer, and teacher. In addition to his role as spiritual leader, Leonard Feeney enjoyed acting as social intermediary among the vibrant young men and women who frequented the Center. He took an immediate liking to Jim, going so far as to introduce the twenty-eight-year-old bachelor to a number of young Radcliffe graduates who were attending classes at the Center. But Jim did not find his soul mate among the young women there.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  But I was respectful of the two men who ran the office, and while I was a neophyte in the world of finance, it was evident to me that they were not only hardworking but also successful. It was not lost on me that, despite their stature within the office, they were always courteous and made me feel like a member of their team. When I found myself with time on my hands, I’d bounce into their office and ask them if there wasn’t something I could do—anything. Before long, I was running errands for them all over town, a welcome diversion from sitting at the front desk and answering the telephone. I had been employed for eight months, when, at yearend, the partners invited me into their wood-paneled office and presented me with a $1500 bonus check. I was speechless—that was almost half of what I had made since I came to the firm. But equally as rewarding was the realization that these two men, who seemed bigger than life to me, were appreciative of my work. One day, not long after the bonus surprise, the two partners once again called me into their office. “We’d like you to do us a favor,” they said. They had been working on a deal, they explained, that was closing at the end of the week, and they needed me to go to New York to collect $5 million in checks from five separate investors. “Here’s a ticket to LaGuardia Airport on the shuttle for tomorrow morning, and a list of the places you need to go. A car and driver will take you to each of the destinations.” Me? Collect $5 million? In New York? On my own? I can do it, and they know I can . As I took the subway home that evening, I reveled in the realization that I, the receptionist, was selected over the half-dozen secretaries whose responsibilities and income were well above mine. The chauffeured limousine was awaiting me at LaGuardia, and for the next few hours, I went from office to office. The last appointment of the day was at the country estate of an elderly man, Mr. Rosenberg. He greeted me at the door, his butler supporting his frail frame as he reached his hand out to me. “Come in,” he said, “please join me for tea.” “Thank you,” I replied instinctively, “I’d love to.” I was brought back to the days in Still River when I was nine years old and the Thursday afternoon tea parties over which Sister Catherine presided. I noted the difference—on this occasion, I was being served rather than serving. Mr. Rosenberg inquired about my interests, and I felt that stab of panic grip my stomach. Dear God, please don’t let him ask me about where I grew up . What would a Jewish man say if he knew I was a Feeneyite?

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “What does Sister Catherine say about your coming down here?” I asked her one day. “She’s told me to do what I must,” my mother replied. I sensed that, for once, my mother had the upper hand with Sister Catherine. I observed the ease with which she seemed to adjust to the world beyond the Center. It was as though she had hardly been separated from the real world for all those years. She was particularly at home buying clothes. She knew fabrics and offered advice on matters of quality (which I took) and fashion (which I mostly discarded). She came from an era when handbags were expected to match shoes in both color and texture. I preferred the mix-and-match approach of the late 1960s, perhaps in defiance of anything that seemed rules-based. She shared with me pictures of herself in the newspaper from her days as a teenage model, and I saw her in a new light. I started reading the society pages of the Boston Globe , engrossing myself in a life that seemed almost surreal—cotillions and balls, auctions and fund-raisers, engagements and weddings—and imagining myself as part of that life of privilege. With little understanding of what was entailed to participate in that lofty world, I blithely asked my mother one day, as we sat reading the newspaper, “Do you think it would be possible for me to make my debut?” My mother’s reaction was spontaneous. With a full-throated laugh, she exclaimed, “Where did you come from? You are the funniest child in the world.” I had much to learn. She went to work as a housekeeper for a young married couple getting their Ph.D.’s at Harvard. Not surprisingly, the three of them became fast friends, and when a year later the couple was expecting a baby, they asked her to be their nanny. My mother accepted the offer with delight. It was almost as though she was seizing the opportunity to re-engage as a mother after having shelved her maternal instincts for so many years. Until she became a nanny, I had felt sorry for my mother—she was smart and sophisticated, if not particularly intellectual. She had a commanding knowledge of world history and a prodigious vocabulary—both of which she credited to her education at Cambridge High and Latin. I wished she could be doing something that was more stimulating, but in her nun-like fashion, she never complained. Some of our most enjoyable times together were spent watching TV mystery shows—Hawaii Five-O , Mission Impossible , and Columbo . My mother could pick out the culprit within three minutes of the start of the show, and I had to beseech her to keep it to herself. “I should have been a detective,” she’d say, with an air of supreme confidence. * * * A year of teaching shorthand and typing had become tedious. I craved more intellectual stimulation, but quitting never crossed my mind; that seemed to be a dereliction of duty.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  It was two years after moving to New York when I found the courage to step through that door. I had been dating a man for about a year, a respected oil analyst on Wall Street, whom I’d met at a business lunch. This man whom I adored was twenty years my senior, and in the short time we’d been together, he had unearthed a world that was far beyond the reveries of my once childish imagination. Together we traveled to exotic places—Egypt and Tobago. On the moonlit balcony of our room at the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he read to me—poems by Stephen Spender and passages from E. M. Forster. For Christmas, he gave me a copy of Skeat’s An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language before presenting me with a pair of gold earrings from Cartier. I sensed he relished the role he played in my life—the older man opening up the world of culture and literature to a receptive and energetic young woman. Perhaps a bit like Professor Higgins, although I hoped he didn’t consider me quite Eliza Doolittle. “Gamine” was what he sometimes called me. At first I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or a put-down, but I came to understand it as a term of endearment—I was the raring-to-go, not-quite-settled girl and he was the already accomplished man of Wall Street. On a warm summer evening, I was sitting with him in his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, coddling a glass of white wine, the light of day still pouring into the living room through the skylight above. I had my feet tucked underneath me as I excitedly explained my upcoming business trip to Paris. He mentioned that his mother lived in the town of Orgeval, a few kilometers outside of Paris. She had recently broken her hip, he said, and was struggling with her recovery. “I’d love to visit her,” I told him. That’s when he got silent, and I sensed something was wrong. “Tell me,” I said. A tear came to his eye, and he reached out his hand, with its slight tremble, to take my own in his. The words formed slowly. “My mother’s a lesbian,” he said, and the tear rolled down his cheek. His pain touched me—he’d spoken of his mother before, but only in reference to his parents’ divorce when he was barely old enough to walk and how he would go for months at a time pining for her. I knew deeply what that separation felt like, yet I had not braved sharing with him the story of my

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  Ina Garten makes cooking seem easy, accessible. She loves good ingredients—good vanilla, good olive oil, good everything. She is always offering helpful tips—very cold butter makes pastry dough better, and a cook’s best tools are clean hands. She uses an ice cream scoop for the dough when she’s making muffins and reminds the audience of this trick with a conspiratorial grin. When she shops in town, she always asks the butcher or fishmonger or baker to put her purchases on her account. She doesn’t sully herself with cash. One day, she invites some construction workers who are rehabbing a windmill over for lunch and she decorates the table with construction accessories like a tarp and some paintbrushes and a bucket. As she prepares their meal, she makes sure to provide man-sized portions, to be followed by a brownie pie, a decadent affair I would eventually try to bake. What I love most about Ina is that she teaches me about fostering a strong sense of self and self-confidence. She teaches me about being at ease in my body. From all appearances, she is entirely at ease with herself. She is ambitious and knows she is excellent at what she does and never apologizes for it. She teaches me that a woman can be plump and pleasant and absolutely in love with food. She gives me permission to love food. She gives me permission to acknowledge my hungers and to try and satisfy them in healthy ways. She gives me permission to buy the “good” ingredients she is so fond of recommending so that I might make good food for myself and the people for whom I enjoy cooking. She gives me permission to embrace my ambition and believe in myself. In the case of Barefoot Contessa, a cooking show is far more than just a cooking show. 64I am not the kind of person who can survey the pantry, identify four or five random ingredients, and assemble a delicious meal. I need the protection and comfort of recipes. I require gentle instruction and guidance. On a good day, I can experiment with a recipe, try to mix things up, but I need a foundation of some kind. There is, I must admit, something very satisfying about making things from scratch, to know every dish in a meal was made by your own hands. As a lazy person, I’m a fan of premade things, but it was a lot of fun and deeply relaxing to make, for example, my own dough and my own cherry filling for a beautiful cherry pie. I felt productive and capable. What has fascinated me about cooking, and coming to it in the middle of my life, is how it’s actually a really good endeavor for a control freak. There are rules, and to succeed, at least in the early going, those rules need to be followed. I am good at following rules when I choose to.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 34—Paul on Gender Roles and Slavery 227 ‹ Paul uses language that is vivid and graceful, possibly quoting a song or poem. The poem traces an arc in which Christ moves from a high point to a low point and back up again. ● At the outset—the high point—Christ was in the form of God. In the downward movement, Christ emptied himself and let go of his status. He took on the form of a slave and was born as a human being. The low point occurred when he became obedient to the point of death, giving up his life through crucifixion. ● Only then does the upward movement take place again, as God elevates Jesus to glory through resurrection. ‹ Paul says that his own life had a similar pattern. In chapter 3, he notes that he once had high status as a Pharisee. Then, the downward movement began when Paul became a follower of Jesus. He let go of a sense of identity that was based on heritage and achievement—what he believed gave him status—to live out a relationship that he was convinced had true value. And Paul said that he, too, could move from death into life through resurrection, just as Jesus had done. This perspective enables him to move through the experience of loss in the conviction that it does not define his future. ‹ In chapter 3, Paul also gives us a glimpse into gender roles in the church at Philippi. He speaks of two women, Eudoia and Syntyche, who had striven beside him in the work of the gospel. This idea of a close partnership between women and men in Christian communities was typical for Paul. Philemon ‹ Philemon is a letter addressed to a slave owner of that name. Because Paul had apparently introduced Philemon to the Christian faith, there was a significant bond between the two. In prison, Paul met a slave named Onesimus, who belonged to Philemon and had also become a Christian. It’s possible that Onesimus had come to Paul for help concerning some problem with his master. ‹ The letter reframes the relationship between master and slave in the context of Christian community. Instead of saying that Philemon should set Onesimus free, Paul uses the paradigm of family relationships. Given that both master and

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  138 LECTURE 21 Esther, Daniel, and Life under Empire T he books of Esther and Daniel tell stories of life under the Persian Empire and the Hellenistic or Greek empires that followed. They show the schemes of the high and mighty being subverted and the vulnerable winning out in the end. At this time, the Jewish people were a small minority of these vast empires’ populations. Some of them had returned to Jerusalem, while others had stayed in Babylon and other regions ruled by the Persians. Wherever they were, they needed to make lives for themselves, with hope and encouragement, at a time when they were subject to the whims of those in power. The books of Esther and Daniel suggest how they did so. Esther as Queen ‹The Persian rulers saw themselves as dignified and authoritative, but the Persian king in the story of Esther is not too bright. He repeatedly has other people tell him what to do, and his decisions are often ludicrous. The king’s primary adviser is the wicked Haman. ●By way of contrast, a truly noble figure in the story is a Jewish man named Mordecai, who lives among the exiles under Persian rule. Mordecai has adopted his cousin Esther, who is an orphan, and raised her as his own daughter. He will foil the evil schemes of Haman and seek the welfare of his own people. ●Esther herself is beautiful, and she rises from the status of commoner to become queen of the empire. She shows wisdom and courage and uses her powerful position to save those who are threatened. Esther’s story shows that even under domination by a foreign power, ordinary people may do great things. ‹In the first scene, the king of Persia holds a great banquet and commands his wife, Vashti, to make an appearance to allow everyone to see her great beauty. But his wife refuses to come. The king’s advisers warn that Vashti’s refusal to

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  This makes a truly spiritual reading of the Bible difficult. The achievements of the historical-critical method have been magnificent; it has given us unprecedented knowledge about the Bible but has not yet provided us with a spirituality. Fishbane is right: the horoz and pesher exegesis of the past are no longer an option. Nor are the elaborate allegories of Origen, who was able to find a gospel miqra in every word of the Hebrew scriptures. This type of figurative exegesis offends modern academic sensibilities, because it violates the integrity of the original text. But there was a generosity in allegoria that is often lacking in modern discourse. Philo and Origen did not dismiss the biblical texts with disdain but gave them the benefit of the doubt. Modern philosophers of language have argued that ‘the principle of charity’ is essential for any form of communication. If we truly want to understand the other, we have to assume that he or she is speaking the truth. Allegoria was an attempt to find truth in texts that seemed barbarous and opaque and then ‘translate’ them into a more congenial idiom.1 The logician N. L. Wilson has argued that a critic who confronts an alien body of texts must apply the ‘principle of charity’. He or she must seek interpretation, which ‘in light of what it knows of the facts, will maximize truth among the sentences of the corpus’.2 The linguist Donald Davidson maintains that ‘Making sense of the utterance and behaviour of others, even their most aberrant behaviour, requires you to find a great deal of truth and reason in them.’3 Even though their beliefs may be very different from your own, ‘you have to assume that the alien is very much the same as you are,’ otherwise you are in danger of denying their humanity. ‘Charity is forced upon us,’ Davidson concludes. ‘Whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must regard them as right in most matters.’4 In the public arena, however, people are often presumed to be wrong before they are proved right, and this has inevitably affected our understanding of the Bible. The ‘principle of charity’ accords with the religious ideal of compassion, the duty to ‘feel with’ the other. Some of the greatest exegetes of the past – Hillel, Jesus, Paul, Johanan ben Zakkai, Akiba and Augustine – insisted that charity and loving kindness were essential to biblical interpretation. In our dangerously polarized world, a common hermeneutics among the religions should surely emphasize this tradition. Jews, Christians and Muslims must first examine the flaws of their own scriptures and only then listen, with humility, generosity and charity to the exegesis of others.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The Antiochenes could not discard all typological exegesis, because it had been used so copiously by the evangelists, but they urged scholars to stick to the allegories in the New Testament and not to go in search of new ones. Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia from 392 to 428, could see no value in the Song of Songs, for example; it was just a love poem and could only be read as a sacred text if entirely alien meanings were superimposed upon it. But in Alexandria, the Song was popular precisely because it offered such rich opportunities for allegoria. Versed in the same hermeneutic tradition as Philo, the Christians of Alexandria had developed an art of reading that they called spiritual interpretation – an attempt to reproduce the experience of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Like the rabbis, they saw the Bible as an inexhaustible text, capable of yielding endlessly new meanings. They did not think that they were reading into scripture things that were not there but would have agreed with the rabbis that ‘everything is in it’. The most brilliant Alexandrian exegete was Origen (185–254), the most influential and prolific author of the day. 14 Besides his biblical commentaries, he produced the Hexapla (an edition of the Bible that placed the Hebrew text beside five different Greek translations), and two monumental works: Against Celsus, an apologia to refute a pagan philosopher’s critique of Christianity, and On First Principles, a comprehensive account of Christian doctrine. For Origen, Jesus was the beginning and end of all exegesis: Jesus reveals the law to us when he reveals to us the secrets of the Law. For we who are of the catholic Church, we do not spurn the law of Moses but accept it, so long as it is Jesus who reads it to us. Indeed, we can only possess a correct understanding of the Law when he reads it to us, and we are able to receive his sense and understanding. 15 For Origen, the Jewish scriptures were a midrash on the New Testament, which had itself been a commentary on the Tanakh. Without allegory, the Bible made no sense at all. How could you explain literally Christ’s command: ‘If your right eye should cause you to sin, tear it out and throw it away’? 16 How could a Christian accept the savage command that uncircumcised boys be killed? 17 What possible relevance to Christians were the lengthy instructions for the building of the tabernacle? 18 Did the biblical writer really mean that God ‘walked’ in the Garden of Eden? 19 Or insist that Christ’s disciples should never wear shoes? 20 If you interpreted it literally it was ‘a very difficult, not to say impossible task’ to revere the Bible as a holy book. 21 Reading scripture was far from easy – a fact that Origen emphasized again and again.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Calvin never tired of pointing out that in the Bible God condescended to our limitations. The Word was conditioned by the historical circumstances in which it was uttered, so the less edifying stories of the Bible must be seen in context, as a phase in an ongoing process. There was no need to explain them away allegorically. The creation story in Genesis was an example of this divine balbative (‘baby talk’), which adapted immensely complex processses to the mentality of uneducated people.27 It was not surprising that the Genesis story differed from the new theories of learned philosophers. Calvin had great respect for modern science. It should not be condemned simply ‘because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them. For astronomy is not only pleasant but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.’28 It was absurd to expect scripture to teach scientific fact; anybody who wanted to learn about astronomy should look elsewhere. The natural world was God’s first revelation, and Christians should regard the new geographical, biological and physical sciences as religious activities.29 The great scientists shared this view. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) regarded science as ‘more divine than human’.30 His heliocentric hypothesis was so radical that few people could take it in: instead of being located in the centre of the universe, the earth and the other planets were rotating around the sun; the world appeared to be stable, but was in fact in rapid motion. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) tested the Copernican theory empirically by observing the planets through his telescope. He was silenced by the Inquisition and forced to recant, but his somewhat aggressive and provocative temperament had also played a part in his condemnation. At first, Catholics and Protestants did not automatically reject the new science. The Pope approved of Copernicus’s theory when he first presented it in the Vatican and the early Calvinists and Jesuits were both keen scientists. But some were disturbed by the new theories. How could you reconcile Copernicus’s theory with a literal reading of Genesis? If, as Galileo suggested, there was life on the moon, how had these people descended from Adam? How could the revolutions of the earth be squared with Christ’s ascension to heaven? Scripture said that the heavens and the earth had been created for man’s benefit, but how could this be so if the earth was just another planet revolving round an undistinguished star?31 The old allegorical exegesis would have made it much easier for Christians to cope with their changing world.32 But the increasing emphasis on the literal meaning of scripture was the product of early modernity: the scientific bias of early modern thought required people to see truth as conforming to the laws of the external world. It would not be long before some Christians would conclude that unless a book was historically or scientifically demonstrable it could not be true at all. *

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  We do not know very much about the Yavneh period, however.1 The coalition of scholars was led by the Pharisees, initially by R. Johanan and his two gifted pupils, R. Eliezer and R. Joshua, and later by R. Akiba. Long before the tragedy of 70, the Pharisees had encouraged the laity to live as though they were serving in the temple, so that each hearth became an altar, each householder a priest. Yet the Pharisees had continued to worship in the real temple as well and never imagined that Jews would one day have to manage without it. Even during their years at Yavneh, they seem to have believed that Jews would be able to build a new temple, but their ideology was well suited to the post–70 world because they had, as it were, constructed their daily lives around a virtual temple which became the focus of their spirituality. Now R. Johanan and his successors would begin to build this imaginary shrine in more detail. The first task of the rabbis at Yavneh was to collect and preserve all the available memories, practices and rituals of traditional religion, so that when the temple was rebuilt the cult could be resumed. Other Jews might plan new rebellions against the Roman empire; Christians could insist that Jesus had replaced the temple; but together with the scribes and priests who had joined them at Yavneh, the Pharisees would make a heroic effort to keep every single detail of the lost shrine in their minds, at the same time as they revised the Torah to meet the needs of their drastically altered world. It would take the Pharisees many years to become the undisputed leaders of the new Judaism. But by the late 80s and 90s, as we have seen, some of the Christians had begun to feel seriously threatened by Yavneh, whose vision seemed more compelling and authentic to many Jews than the gospel. Yet in fact the Pharisaic enterprise had much in common with early Christian churches. The Pharisees would also search the scriptures, invent another form of exegesis, and compose new sacred texts – even though they would never claim that these formed a ‘New Testament’.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  26 The religion entrusted to Abraham was tailored to the needs of a simpler society than the torah bestowed upon Moses or David. The revelation became progressively clearer and more focused on the christos, right up to the time of John the Baptizer, who had looked directly into the eyes of Jesus. But the Old Testament was not simply about Christ, as Luther had argued. The covenant with Israel had its own integrity; it came from the same God, and the study of the Torah would help Christians to understand the Gospel. Calvin would become the most influential of the Protestant reformers and make the Jewish scriptures more important to Christians – especially in the Anglo-Saxon world – than ever before. Calvin never tired of pointing out that in the Bible God condescended to our limitations. The Word was conditioned by the historical circumstances in which it was uttered, so the less edifying stories of the Bible must be seen in context, as a phase in an ongoing process. There was no need to explain them away allegorically. The creation story in Genesis was an example of this divine balbative (‘baby talk’), which adapted immensely complex processses to the mentality of uneducated people. 27 It was not surprising that the Genesis story differed from the new theories of learned philosophers. Calvin had great respect for modern science. It should not be condemned simply ‘because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them. For astronomy is not only pleasant but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.’ 28 It was absurd to expect scripture to teach scientific fact; anybody who wanted to learn about astronomy should look elsewhere. The natural world was God’s first revelation, and Christians should regard the new geographical, biological and physical sciences as religious activities. 29 The great scientists shared this view. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) regarded science as ‘more divine than human’. 30 His heliocentric hypothesis was so radical that few people could take it in: instead of being located in the centre of the universe, the earth and the other planets were rotating around the sun; the world appeared to be stable, but was in fact in rapid motion. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) tested the Copernican theory empirically by observing the planets through his telescope. He was silenced by the Inquisition and forced to recant, but his somewhat aggressive and provocative temperament had also played a part in his condemnation. At first, Catholics and Protestants did not automatically reject the new science. The Pope approved of Copernicus’s theory when he first presented it in the Vatican and the early Calvinists and Jesuits were both keen scientists. But some were disturbed by the new theories. How could you reconcile Copernicus’s theory with a literal reading of Genesis?

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Yet many of the men of reason were in love with the classics of Graeco-Roman antiquity, which seemed to fulfil many of the functions of scripture.1 When Diderot read the classics, he experienced ‘transports of admiration . . . thrills of joy . . . divine enthusiasm’.2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–72) declared that he would study the Greek and Roman authors again and again.‘I took fire!’ he cried on reading Plutarch.3 When the English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94) visited Rome for the first time, he found that he could not proceed with his research because he was ‘agitated’ by such ‘strong emotions’ and experienced a quasi-religious ‘intoxication’ and ‘enthusiasm’.4 They all invested these ancient works with their deepest aspirations, allowed them to shape their minds, inform their interior world, and found that, in return, the texts gave them moments of transcendence. * Other scholars applied their sceptically critical skills to the Bible. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), a Sephardic Jew of Spanish descent born in the liberal city of Amsterdam, had studied mathematics, astronomy and physics and found them incompatible with his religious beliefs.5 In 1655 he started to voice doubts that unsettled his community: the manifest contradictions in the Bible proved that it could not be of divine origin; the idea of revelation was a delusion; and there was no supernatural deity – what we called ‘God’ was simply nature itself. On 27 July 1656 Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion. Spinoza dismissed conventional faith as ‘a tissue of meaningless mysteries’; he preferred to get what he called ‘beatitude’ from the untrammelled exercise of his reason.6 Spinoza studied the historical background and literary genres of the Bible with unprecedented objectivity. He agreed with Ibn Ezra that Moses could not have written the entire Pentateuch but went on to claim that the extant text was the work of several different authors. He had become the pioneer of the historical-critical method that would later be called the Higher Criticism of the Bible.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  But because few of them could read classical Hebrew, they could not understand the Torah. Indeed, even in Palestine, most Jews conversed in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and needed a translation ( targum ) when the Law and the Prophets were read aloud in the synagogue. Jews had started to translate their scriptures into Greek during the third century BCE on the island of Pharos, just off the coast of Alexandria. 54 This project was probably initiated by the Alexandrian Jews themselves but over the years it acquired a mythical aura. It was said that Ptolemy Philadelpus, the Greek king of Egypt, was so impressed by the Jewish scriptures that he wanted a translation for his library. So he asked the High Priest in Jerusalem to send six elders from each of the twelve tribes to Pharos. They all worked on the text together and produced a translation that was so perfect that everybody agreed that it must be preserved forever ‘imperishable and unchanged’. 55 In honour of its seventy-plus translators, it was known as the Septuagint. Another legend seemed to have absorbed elements of the new Torah spirituality. The seventy translators proved to be ‘prophets and priests of the mysteries’: ‘Sitting . . . in seclusion . . . they became as it were possessed, and under inspiration, wrote, not each several scribe something different, but the same word for word.’ 56 Like the exegete, the translators were inspired and uttered the word of God in the same way as the biblical authors themselves. This last story was told by the famous Alexandrian exegete Philo (70 BCE to 45 CE ), who came from a wealthy Jewish family in Alexandria. 57 Although Philo was a contemporary of John the Baptizer, Jesus and Hillel (one of the most distinguished of the early Pharisees), he inhabited a very different intellectual world. A Platonist, Philo produced a large number of commentaries on Genesis and Exodus, which transformed them into allegories of divine logos (reason). This was another species of translatio . Philo was trying to ‘transfer’ or ‘carry over’ the essence of the Semitic tales into another cultural idiom and place them in an alien conceptual framework. Philo did not invent the allegorical method. The grammatikoi of Alexandria were already ‘translating’ Homer’s epics into philosophical terms, so that Greeks who were trained in the rationalism of Plato and Aristotle could use the Iliad and Odyssey as part of their quest for wisdom. They based their allegoria on numerology and etymology. Besides its everyday connotation, every name had a deeper, symbolic meaning that expressed its eternal, Platonic form.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Like the Yerushalmi, it was a commentary ( gemara ) on the Mishnah, but did not ignore the Tanakh, which was used to support the Oral Torah. In some ways, the Bavli was similar to the New Testament in that its author-editors regarded it as the completion of the Hebrew Bible – a new revelation for a changed world. 53 Like the New Testament, the Bavli was highly selective in its treatment of the older scripture, choosing only those portions of the Tanakh that it found useful and ignoring the rest. The commentary of the Bavli went systematically through the Mishnah, portion by portion. The gemara referred not only to the Bible but also to the opinions of the rabbis, legends, history, theological reflections and legal lore. This method compelled the student to integrate the written and oral traditions, so that they merged together in his mind. The Bavli included a good deal of material that was older than the Mishnah but much of its content was new, so the student gained a fresh perspective that changed his view of both the Mishnah and the Bible. The Bavli revered the older texts but saw neither as sacrosanct. In their commentary, the author-editors would sometimes reverse the legislation of the Mishnah, play off one rabbi against another, and point out serious gaps in the Mishnah’s arguments. They did exactly the same with the Bible, noting lacunae in the biblical texts , 54 suggesting what the inspired authors should have said, 55 and even changing a biblical law to more congenial rulings of their own. 56 When read in conjunction with the Bavli, the Bible was transformed, in the same way as the New Testament altered the Christians’ reading of the ‘Old Testament’. If biblical texts were included in the gemara, they were never discussed on their own terms and in a biblical context, but were always read from the point of view of the Mishnah. As R. Abdini of Haifa explained, the rabbis were the new prophets: ‘Since the day the temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the sages.’ 57 The Torah was thus a transcendent reality embodied in two earthly forms: a written scripture and an oral tradition. 58 Both came from God; both were necessary, but the rabbis privileged the Oral Torah because a written text could encourage inflexibility and a backward-looking orientation, whereas the spoken word and the ever-shifting currents of human thought made the Word more sensitive to changing conditions. 59 We hear many voices in the Bavli: Abraham, Moses, the prophets, the Pharisees and the rabbis. They were not confined to their historical period but brought together on the same page, so that they seemed to be debating with each other across the centuries – often disagreeing quite vehemently. The Bavli gave no definitive answers. If an argument ended in impasse, the students had to sort it out to their own satisfaction with their teachers.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Preachers must be well read in rabbinical and patristic exegesis and acquainted with contemporary scholarship. They must always see a biblical passage in its original context but at the same time they must make the Bible relevant to the daily needs of their congregations. Zwingli’s study of the Greek and Roman classics had taught him to appreciate other religious cultures: 24 the Bible did not have the monopoly of revealed truth; Socrates and Plato had also been inspired by the Spirit and Christians would meet them in heaven. Like Luther, Zwingli believed that the written Word must be spoken aloud. Because a preacher was guided by the Spirit in the same way as the biblical authors, Zwingli regarded his own sermons as prophetic. His task was to animate the written Word and make it a living force in the community. The Bible was not about what God had done in the past, but what he did here and now. 25 Calvin, however, had no time for classical culture. He agreed with Luther that Christ was the focus of scripture and the ultimate manifestation of God. But Calvin had a far greater appreciation of the Hebrew Bible. God’s revelation had been a gradual, evolutionary process; at each stage of their history, he had adapted his truth to the limited capacity of human beings. The teaching and guidance that God had given to Israel had changed and developed over time. 26 The religion entrusted to Abraham was tailored to the needs of a simpler society than the torah bestowed upon Moses or David. The revelation became progressively clearer and more focused on the christos , right up to the time of John the Baptizer, who had looked directly into the eyes of Jesus. But the Old Testament was not simply about Christ, as Luther had argued. The covenant with Israel had its own integrity; it came from the same God, and the study of the Torah would help Christians to understand the Gospel. Calvin would become the most influential of the Protestant reformers and make the Jewish scriptures more important to Christians – especially in the Anglo-Saxon world – than ever before. Calvin never tired of pointing out that in the Bible God condescended to our limitations. The Word was conditioned by the historical circumstances in which it was uttered, so the less edifying stories of the Bible must be seen in context, as a phase in an ongoing process. There was no need to explain them away allegorically. The creation story in Genesis was an example of this divine balbative (‘baby talk’), which adapted immensely complex processses to the mentality of uneducated people. 27 It was not surprising that the Genesis story differed from the new theories of learned philosophers. Calvin had great respect for modern science. It should not be condemned simply ‘because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  3 In the Jewish scriptures, God had sent a coded message to humanity that the Christians alone had managed to decipher. Justin’s notion of the Logos became central to the exegesis of the theologians who are known as the ‘fathers’ of the church, because they created the seminal ideas of Christianity and adapted this Jewish faith to the Graeco-Roman world. From an early date, the fathers regarded the Tanakh as an elaborate sign system. As Irenaeus explained, the writings of Moses were really the words of Christ, the eternal Logos, who had been speaking through him. 4 The fathers did not see the ‘Old Testament’ as an anthology of writings but as a single book with a unified message, which Irenaeus called its hypothesis, the argument ‘beneath’ (hypo) the surface. The Hebrew scriptures did not mention Jesus directly but his life and death formed the coded subtext of the Bible and also revealed the secret of the cosmos. 5 Material objects, invisible realities, historical events and natural laws – indeed, everything that existed – formed part of a divinely organized system, which Irenaeus called the ‘economy’. Everything had its proper place in the economy and connected with everything else to form a harmonious whole. Jesus was the incarnation of this divine economy. As Paul had explained, his coming had finally revealed God’s plan: ‘that the universe, everything in heaven and earth, might be brought into a unity [anakephalaiosis] in Christ’. 6 Jesus was the reason, purpose and culmination of God’s grand design. Because Christ lay at the heart of the Hebrew scriptures, they also expressed the divine economy, but this subtext only became apparent if the Bible was interpreted correctly. Like the cosmos itself, scripture was a text (textus), a tissue made up of an infinite number of interconnecting entities that were ‘woven together’ to form an inextricable whole. 7 Contemplating the encoded textus of scripture helped people to understand that it was Jesus who held everything together and explained the deeper significance of the entire economy. The task of the exegete was to demonstrate this, fitting all the clues together like the interlocking pieces of a vast puzzle. Irenaeus compared the scriptures to a mosaic, composed of innumerable tiny stones which, once they had been placed together correctly, formed the image of a handsome king.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  3 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] Love, at least love for a man not already part of the family, was something I was a little unsure about. Aunt Alma said love had more to do with how pretty a body was than anyone would ever admit, and Glen was pretty enough, she swore, with his wide shoulders and long arms, his hair combed back and his collar buttoned up tight over his skinny neck. Sometimes after Glen had been over to visit and gone, Mama would sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette, looking off into the distance. Sometimes I’d go slide quietly under her armpit and sit with her, saying nothing. I would wonder what she was thinking, but I didn’t ask. If I had, she’d have said something about the road or the trees or the stars. She’d have talked about work or something one of my cousins had done, or one of the uncles, or she’d have swatted my butt and sent me off to bed, then gone back to sitting there with her face so serious, smoking her Pall Mall cigarette right down to the filter. “You and Reese like Glen, don’t you?” Mama would say now and then in a worried voice. I would nod every time. Of course we liked him, I’d tell her, and watch her face relax so her smile came back. “I do too. He’s a good man.” She’d run her hands over her thighs slow, hug her knees up close to her breasts, and nod to herself more than me. “He’s a good man.” The nights Mama worked at the diner, she’d leave us with Aunt Ruth or Aunt Alma. But sometimes, if she wasn’t working too late, she would make up a bed of blankets and pillows in the backseat of her Pontiac and take us with her. She’d feed us dinner in a booth near the kitchen and let us listen to the jukebox for a while before she put us to bed in the car, telling me sternly not to unlock the door for anyone but her. While we sat in that booth, I’d watch her at work. She was mesmerizing, young and sweet-faced and too pretty for anyone to be mean to her. The truckers teased her and played her favorite songs on the jukebox. The younger ones would try to get her to go out with them, but she’d joke them out of it. The older ones who knew her well would compliment her on us, her pretty girls. I watched it all, admiring the men with their muscular forearms and broad shoulders as they sipped the coffee my mama served them, absorbing the music as it played continuously, keeping Reese from spilling her milk or sliding down under the table, and smiling at Mama when she looked over to me.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Uncle Earle was my favorite of all my uncles. He was known as Black Earle for three counties around. Mama said he was called Black Earle for that black black hair that fell over his eyes in a great soft curl, but Aunt Raylene said it was for his black black heart. He was a good-looking man, soft-spoken and hardworking. He told Mama that all the girls loved him because he looked like Elvis Presley, only skinny and with muscles. In a way he did, but his face was etched with lines and sunburned a deep red-brown. The truth was he had none of Elvis Presley’s baby-faced innocence; he had a devilish look and a body Aunt Alma swore was made for sex. He was a big man, long and lanky, with wide hands marked with scars. “Earle looks like trouble coming in on greased skids,” my uncle Beau laughed. All the aunts agreed, their cheeks wrinkling around indulgent smiles while their fingers trailed across Uncle Earle’s big shoulders as sweetly and tenderly as the threadlike feet of hummingbirds. Uncle Earle always seemed to have money in his pockets, some job he was just leaving and another one he was about to take up. His wife had left him around the time Lyle Parsons died, because of what she called his lying ways. He wouldn’t stay away from women, and that made her mad. Teresa was Catholic and took her vows seriously, which Earle had expected, but he had never imagined she would leave him for messing around with girls he would never have married and didn’t love. His anger and grief over losing her and his three daughters gave him an underlying bitterness that seemed to make him just that much more attractive. “That Earle’s got the magic,” Aunt Ruth told me. “Man is just a magnet to women. Breaks their hearts and makes them like it.” She shook her head and smiled at me. “All these youngsters playing at being something, imagining they can drive women wild with their narrow little hips and sweet baby smiles, they never gonna have the gift Earle has, don’t even know enough to recognize it for what it is. A sad wounded man who genuinely likes women—that’s what Earle is, a hurt little boy with just enough meanness in him to keep a woman interested.” She pushed my hair back off my face and ran her thumb over my eyebrows, smoothing down the fine black hairs. “Your real daddy…” She paused, looked around, and started again. “He had some of that too, just enough, anyway, to win your mama. He liked women too, and that’s something I can say for him. A man who really likes women always has a touch of magic.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Glen Waddell nodded, understanding completely the look on Earle’s face. The man was a Boatwright, after all, and he and his two brothers had all gone to jail for causing other men serious damage. Rumor told deadly stories about the Boatwright boys, the kind of tales men whispered over whiskey when women were not around. Earle was good with a hammer or a saw, and magical with a pickax. He drove a truck like he was making love to the gears and carried a seven-inch pigsticker in the side pocket of his reinforced painter’s pants. Earle Boatwright was everything Glen had ever wanted to be—specially since his older brothers laughed at him for his hot temper, bad memory, and general uselessness. Moreover, Earle had a gift for charming people—men or women—and he had charmed the black sheep of the Waddell family right out of his terror of the other men on the crew, charmed him as well out of his fear of his family’s disapproval. When Earle turned that grin on him, Glen found himself grinning back, enjoying the notion of angering his daddy and outraging his brothers. It was something to work for, that relaxed and disarming grin of Earle’s. It made a person want to see it again, to feel Earle’s handclasp along with it and know a piece of Earle’s admiration. More than anything in the world, Glen Waddell wanted Earle Boatwright to like him. Never mind that pretty little girl, he told himself, and put his manners on hard until Earle settled back down. Glen yes-ma’amed all the waitresses and grabbed Earle’s check right out of Anney’s hand, though it would take him down to quarters and cigarettes after he paid it. But when Earle went off to the bathroom, Glen let himself watch her again, that bow on her ass and the way her lips kept pulling back off her teeth when she smiled. Anney looked him once full in the face, and he saw right through her. She had grinned at her brother with an open face and bright sparkling eyes, an easy smile and a soft mouth, a face without fear or guile. The smile she gave Glen and everyone else at the counter was just as easy but not so open. Between her eyes was a fine line that deepened when her smile tightened. A shadow darkened her clear pupils in the moment before her glance moved away. It made her no less pretty but added an aura of sadness. “You coming over tonight, Earle?” she asked when he came back, in a voice as buttery and sweet as the biscuits. “The girls miss you ‘bout as much as I do.” “Might be over,” Earle drawled, “if this kid here does his job right and we get through before dark this time.” He slapped Glen’s shoulder lightly and winked at Anney. “Maybe I’ll even bring him with me.”